Civil Disobedience

What makes a breach of law an act of civil disobedience? When is
civil disobedience morally justified? How should the law respond to
people who engage in civil disobedience? Discussions of civil
disobedience have tended to focus on the first two of these questions.
On the most widely accepted account of civil disobedience, famously
defended by John Rawls (1971), civil disobedience is a public,
non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of
bringing about a change in laws or government policies. On this
account, people who engage in civil disobedience are willing to
accept the legal consequences of their actions, as this shows their
fidelity to the rule of law. Civil disobedience, given its place at the
boundary of fidelity to law, is said to fall between legal protest, on
the one hand, and conscientious refusal, revolutionary action, militant
protest and organised forcible resistance, on the other hand.

This picture of civil disobedience raises many questions. Why must
civil disobedience be non-violent? Why must it be public, in the sense
of forewarning authorities of the intended action, since publicity
gives authorities an opportunity to interfere with the action? Why must
people who engage in civil disobedience be willing to accept
punishment? A general challenge to Rawls's conception of civil
disobedience is that it is overly narrow, and as such it predetermines
the conclusion that most acts of civil disobedience are morally
justifiable. A further challenge is that Rawls applies his theory of
civil disobedience only to the context of a nearly just society,
leaving unclear whether a credible conception of either the nature or
the justification of civil disobedience could follow the same lines in
the context of less just societies. Some broader accounts of civil
disobedience offered in response to Rawls's view (Raz 1979;
Greenawalt 1987) will be examined in the first section of this
entry.

This entry has four main sections. The first considers some
definitional issues and contrasts civil disobedience with both ordinary
offences and other types of dissent. The second analyses two sets of
factors relevant to the justification of civil disobedience; one set
concerns the disobedient's particular choice of action, the other
concerns her motivation for so acting. The third section examines whether people have a right to engage in civil
disobedience. The fourth considers what kind of legal response to civil
disobedience is appropriate.

The term ‘civil disobedience’ was coined by Henry David
Thoreau in his 1848 essay to describe his refusal to pay the state poll
tax implemented by the American government to prosecute a war in Mexico
and to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. In his essay, Thoreau observes
that only a very few people – heroes, martyrs, patriots,
reformers in the best sense – serve their society with their
consciences, and so necessarily resist society for the most part, and
are commonly treated by it as enemies. Thoreau,
for his part, spent time in jail for his protest. Many after him have
proudly identified their protests as acts of civil disobedience and
have been treated by their societies – sometimes temporarily,
sometimes indefinitely – as its enemies.

Throughout history, acts of civil disobedience famously have
helped to force a reassessment of society's moral parameters. The
Boston Tea Party, the suffragette movement, the resistance to British
rule in India led by Gandhi, the US civil rights movement led by
Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and others, the resistance to
apartheid in South Africa, student sit-ins against the Vietnam War,
the democracy movement in Myanmar/Burma led by Aung San Suu Kyi, to
name a few, are all instances where civil disobedience proved to be an
important mechanism for social change. The ultimate impact of more
recent acts of civil disobedience – anti-abortion trespass
demonstrations or acts of disobedience taken as part of the
environmental movement and animal rights movement – remains to
be seen.

Certain features of civil disobedience seem vital not only to its
impact on societies and governments, but also to its status as a
potentially justifiable breach of law. Civil disobedience is generally
regarded as more morally defensible than both ordinary offences and
other forms of protest such as militant action or coercive violence.
Before contrasting civil disobedience with both ordinary offences and
other types of protest, attention should be given to the features
exemplified in the influential cases noted above. These features
include, amongst other things, a conscientious or principled outlook
and the communication of both condemnation and a desire for change in
law or policy. Other features commonly cited – publicity,
non-violence, fidelity to law – will also be considered here
though they prove to be less central than is sometimes assumed. The
second part of this section contrasts civil disobedience with ordinary
offences and the third part contrasts it with legal protest, rule
departures by officials, conscientious objection, radical protest
(often labelled ‘terrorism’), and revolutionary action.

Conscientiousness: This feature, highlighted in almost all
accounts of civil disobedience, points to the seriousness, sincerity
and moral conviction with which civil disobedients breach the law. For
many disobedients, their breach of law is demanded of them not only by
self-respect and moral consistency but also by their perception of the
interests of their society. Through their disobedience, they draw
attention to laws or policies that they believe require reassessment or
rejection. Whether their challenges are well-founded is another matter,
which will be taken up in Section 2.

On Rawls's account of civil disobedience, in a nearly just society,
civil disobedients address themselves to the majority to show that, in
their considered opinion, the principles of justice governing
cooperation amongst free and equal persons have not been respected by
policymakers. Rawls's restriction of civil disobedience to breaches
that defend the principles of justice may be criticised for its
narrowness since, presumably, a wide range of legitimate values not
wholly reducible to justice, such as transparency, security,
stability, privacy, integrity, and autonomy, could motivate people to
engage in civil disobedience. However, Rawls does allow that
considerations arising from people's comprehensive moral outlooks may
be offered in the public sphere provided that, in due course, people
present public reasons, given by a reasonable political conception of
justice, sufficient to support whatever their comprehensive doctrines
were introduced to support (Rawls 1996). Rawls's proviso grants that
people often engage in the public sphere for a variety of reasons; so
even when justice figures prominently in a person's decision to use
civil disobedience, other considerations could legitimately contribute
to her decision to act. The activism of Martin Luther King Jr. is a
case in point. King was motivated by his religious convictions and his
commitments to democracy, equality, and justice to undertake protests
such as the Montgomery bus boycott. Rawls maintains that, while he
does not know whether King thought of himself as fulfilling the
purpose of the proviso, King could have fulfilled it; and had he
accepted public reason he certainly would have fulfilled it. Thus, on
Rawls's view, King's activism is civil disobedience.

Since people can undertake political protest for a variety of
reasons, civil disobedience sometimes overlaps with other forms of
dissent. A US draft-dodger during the Vietnam War might be said to
combine civil disobedience and conscientious objection in the same
action. And, most famously, Gandhi may be credited with combining civil
disobedience with revolutionary action. That said, despite the potential for
overlap, some broad distinctions may be drawn between civil
disobedience and other forms of protest in terms of the scope of the
action and agents' motivations (Section 1.3).

Communication: In civilly disobeying the law, a person
typically has both forward-looking and backward-looking aims. She seeks
not only to convey her disavowal and condemnation of a certain law or
policy, but also to draw public attention to this particular issue and
thereby to instigate a change in law or policy. A parallel may be drawn
between the communicative aspect of civil disobedience and the
communicative aspect of lawful punishment by the state (Brownlee 2012;
2004). Like civil disobedience, lawful punishment is associated with a
backward-looking aim to demonstrate condemnation of certain conduct as
well as a forward-looking aim to bring about a lasting change in that
conduct. The forward and backward-looking aims of punishment apply not
only to the particular offence in question, but also to the kind of
conduct of which this offence is an example.

There is some dispute over the kinds of policies that civil
disobedients may target through their breach of law. Some exclude from
the class of civilly disobedient acts those breaches of law that
protest the decisions of private agents such as trade unions, banks,
private universities, etc. (Raz 1979, 264). Others, by contrast,
maintain that disobedience in opposition to the decisions of private
agents can reflect a larger challenge to the legal system that permits
those decisions to be taken, which makes it appropriate to place this
disobedience under the umbrella of civil disobedience (Brownlee 2012;
2007). There is more agreement amongst thinkers that civil
disobedience can be either direct or indirect. In other words, civil
disobedients can either breach the law they oppose or breach a law
which, other things being equal, they do not oppose in order to
demonstrate their protest against another law or policy. Trespassing
on a military base to spray-paint nuclear missile silos in protest
against current military policy would be an example of indirect civil
disobedience. It is worth noting that the distinction often drawn
between direct civil disobedience and indirect civil disobedience is
less clear-cut than generally assumed. For example, refusing to pay
taxes that support the military could be seen as either indirect or
direct civil disobedience against military policy. Although this act
typically would be classified as indirect disobedience, a part of
one's taxes, in this case, would have gone directly to support the
policy one opposes.

Publicity: The feature of communication may be contrasted
with that of publicity. The latter is endorsed by Rawls who argues that
civil disobedience is never covert or secretive; it is only ever
committed in public, openly, and with fair notice to legal authorities
(Rawls 1971, 366). Hugo A. Bedau adds to this that usually it is
essential to the dissenter's purpose that both the government and
the public know what she intends to do (Bedau 1961, 655). However,
although sometimes advance warning may be essential to a
dissenter's strategy, this is not always the case. As noted at
the outset, publicity sometimes detracts from or undermines the attempt
to communicate through civil disobedience. If a person publicises her
intention to breach the law, then she provides both political opponents
and legal authorities with the opportunity to abort her efforts to
communicate (Smart 1991, 206). For this reason, unannounced or
(initially) covert disobedience is sometimes preferable to actions
undertaken publicly and with fair warning. Examples include releasing
animals from research laboratories or vandalising military property; to
succeed in carrying out these actions, disobedients would have to avoid
publicity of the kind Rawls defends. Such acts of civil disobedience
nonetheless may be regarded as ‘open’ when followed soon
after by an acknowledgment of the act and the reasons for acting.
Openness and publicity, even at the cost of having one's protest
frustrated, offer ways for disobedients to show their willingness to
deal fairly with authorities.

Non-violence: A controversial issue in debates on civil
disobedience is non-violence. Like publicity, non-violence is said to
diminish the negative effects of breaching the law. Some theorists go
further and say that civil disobedience is, by definition, non-violent.
According to Rawls, violent acts likely to injure are incompatible with
civil disobedience as a mode of address. ‘Indeed’, says
Rawls, ‘any interference with the civil liberties of others tends
to obscure the civilly disobedient quality of one's
act’ (Rawls 1971, 366).

Even though paradigmatic disobedients like Gandhi and Martin Luther
King Jr embody Rawls's image of non-violent direct action,
opponents of Rawls's view have challenged the centrality of
non-violence for civil disobedience on several fronts. First, there is
the problem of specifying an appropriate notion of violence.
It is unclear, for example, whether violence to self, violence to
property, or minor violence against others (such as a vicious pinch)
should be included in a conception of the relevant kinds of violence.
If the significant criterion for a commonsense notion of a violent act
is a likelihood of causing injury, however minor, then these kinds of
acts count as acts of violence (see Morreall 1991). Second,
non-violent acts or legal acts sometimes cause more harm to others than
do violent acts (Raz 1979, 267). A legal strike by ambulance workers
may well have much more severe consequences than minor acts of
vandalism. Third, violence, depending on its form, does not
necessarily obscure the communicative quality of a disobedient's
action as Rawls and Peter Singer suggests it does (Singer 1973, 86).
Limited violence used to achieve a specific objective might heighten
the communicative quality of the act by drawing greater attention to
the dissenter's cause and by emphasising her seriousness and
frustration.

These observations do not alter the fact that non-violent dissent
normally is preferable to violent dissent. As Raz observes,
non-violence avoids the direct harm caused by violence, and
non-violence does not encourage violence in other situations where
violence would be wrong, something which an otherwise warranted use of
violence may do. Moreover, as a matter of prudence, non-violence does
not carry the same risk of antagonising potential allies or confirming
the antipathy of opponents (Raz 1979, 267). Furthermore, non-violence
does not distract the attention of the public, and it probably denies
authorities an excuse to use violent countermeasures against
disobedients.

Non-violence, publicity and a willingness to accept punishment are
often regarded as marks of disobedients' fidelity to the legal
system in which they carry out their protest. Those who deny that these
features are definitive of civil disobedience endorse a more inclusive
conception according to which civil disobedience involves a
conscientious and communicative breach of law designed to demonstrate
condemnation of a law or policy and to contribute to a change in that
law or policy. Such a conception allows that civil disobedience can be
violent, partially covert, and revolutionary. This conception also
accommodates vagaries in the practice and justifiability of civil
disobedience for different political contexts: it grants that the
appropriate model of how civil disobedience works in a context such as
apartheid South Africa may differ from the model that applies to a
well-ordered, liberal, just democracy. An even broader conception of
civil disobedience would draw no clear boundaries between civil
disobedience and other forms of protest such as conscientious
objection, forcible resistance, and revolutionary action. A
disadvantage of this last conception is that it blurs the lines between
these different types of protest and so might both weaken claims about
the defensibility of civil disobedience and invite authorities and
opponents of civil disobedience to lump all illegal protest under one
umbrella.

In democratic societies, civil disobedience as such is not a crime.
If a disobedient is punished by the law, it is not for civil
disobedience, but for the recognised offences she commits, such as
blocking a road or disturbing the peace, or trespassing, or damaging
property, etc. Therefore, if judges are persuaded, as they sometimes
are, either not to punish a disobedient or to punish her differently
from other people who breach the same laws, it must be on the basis of
some feature or features of her action which distinguish it from the
acts of ordinary offenders.

Typically a person who commits an offence has no wish to communicate
with her government or society. This is evinced by the fact that
usually an offender does not intend to make it known that she has
breached the law. Since, in most cases, she wishes to benefit or, at
least, not to suffer from her unlawful action, it is in her interests
to preserve the secrecy of her conduct. An exception might be where a
person's breach is sufficiently minor, such as jaywalking, that
concealment is unnecessary since sanction is unlikely to follow.
Another exception might be where a person wishes to thumb her nose at
authorities by advertising that she has committed a crime. By making an
exception of herself and by distancing herself from a legal rule, this
ordinary offender communicates a certain disregard for the law. This
communication, however, does not normally reflect an aim either to
demonstrate conscientiously held objections to that law or to lead
society to reform the law. Civil disobedients, by contrast, seek to
make their disobedience known to specific members of the community
either before or after the fact to demonstrate both the seriousness of
their condemnation of that law or policy and their sincere desire for
policy change. The difference in communication between the civil
disobedient and the ordinary offender reflects a deeper difference in
motivation for breaching the law (Brownlee 2012).

A further difference between civil disobedience and common crimes
pertains to the willingness of the offender to accept the legal
consequences. The willingness of disobedients to accept punishment is
taken not only as a mark of (general) fidelity to the law, but also as
an assertion that they differ from ordinary offenders. Accepting
punishment also can have great strategic value, as Martin Luther King
Jr observes: ‘If you confront a man who has been cruelly misusing
you, and say “Punish me, if you will; I do not deserve it, but I
will accept it, so that the world will know I am right and you are
wrong,” then you wield a powerful and just weapon’
(Washington 1991, 348). Moreover, like non-violence, a willingness to
accept the legal consequences normally is preferable, and often has a
positive impact on the disobedient's cause. This willingness
may make the majority realise that what is for them a matter of
indifference is for disobedients a matter of great importance (Singer
1973, 84). Similarly, it may demonstrate the purity or selflessness of
the disobedient's motives or serve as a means to mobilise more
broad-based support (Raz 1979, 265). And yet, punishment can also be
detrimental to dissenters' efforts by compromising future
attempts to assist others through protest (Greenawalt 1987, 239).
Furthermore, the link between a willingness to accept punishment and
respect for law can be pulled apart. A revolutionary like Gandhi was
happy to go to jail for his offences, but felt no fidelity toward the
particular legal system in which he acted.

Although civil disobedience often overlaps broadly with other types
of dissent, nevertheless some rough distinctions may be drawn between
the key features of civil disobedience and the key features of these
other practices.

Legal Protest: The obvious difference between legal protest
and civil disobedience is that the former lies within the bounds of the
law, but the latter does not. Most of the other features exemplified in
civil disobedience can be found in legal protest including a
conscientious and communicative demonstration of protest, a desire to
bring about through moral dialogue some lasting change in policy or
principle, an attempt to educate and to raise awareness, and so on. The
difference in legality translates into a more significant, moral
difference when placed against the backdrop of a general moral
obligation to follow the law. If it is morally wrong to breach the law,
then special justification is required for civil disobedience which is
not required for legal protest. However, the political regime in which
obedience is demanded may be relevant here. David Lyons maintains that
the Jim Crow laws (racial segregation laws in force in the southern US
until 1964), British colonial rule in India, and chattel slavery in
antebellum America offer three refutations of the view that civil
disobedience requires moral justification in morally objectionable
regimes. According to Lyons, there can be no moral presumption in
favour of obedience to the law in such regimes, and therefore no moral
justification is required for civil disobedience. ‘Insofar as
civil disobedience theory assumes that political resistance requires
moral justification even in settings that are morally comparable to Jim
Crow,’ says Lyons, ‘it is premised on serious moral
error’ (Lyons 1998, 39). If one takes the view that there is no
general moral obligation to follow the law (irrespective of regime),
then both adherence to the law and breach of law must be judged not on
their legality, but on their character and consequences. And this would
mean that, even in morally reprehensible regimes, justification may be
demanded for civil disobedience that either has significant negative
consequences or falls below certain moral standards.

Although questions of justification will be addressed more fully in
the next section, it is worth noting here one point in favour of civil
disobedience over legal protest. As Bertrand Russell observes,
typically it is difficult to make the most salient facts in a dispute
known through conventional channels of participation. The controllers
of mainstream media tend to give defenders of unpopular views limited
space to make their case. Given the sensational news value of illegal
methods, however, engaging in civil disobedience often leads to wide
dissemination of a position (Russell 1998, 635). John Stuart
Mill observes, with regard to dissent in general, that sometimes the
only way to make a view heard is to allow, or even to invite, society
to ridicule and sensationalise it as intemperate and irrational (Mill
1999). Admittedly, the success of this strategy depends partly on the
character of the society in which it is employed; but it should not be
ruled out as a strategy for communication.

Rule Departures: A practice distinct from, but related to,
civil disobedience is rule departure on the part of authorities. Rule
departure is essentially the deliberate decision by an official, for
conscientious reasons, not to discharge the duties of her office
(Feinberg 1979). It may involve a decision by police not to arrest
offenders (cf. Smith 2012) or a decision by prosecutors not to
proceed to trial, or a decision by a jury or by a judge to acquit an
obviously guilty person. Whether these conscientious acts actually
contravene the general duties of the office is debatable. If an
official's breach of a specific duty is more in keeping with the
spirit and overall aims of the office than a painstaking respect for
its particular duties is, then the former might be said to adhere
better than the latter does to the demands of the office (Greenawalt
1987, 281)

Rule departures resemble civil disobedience in that both involve
dissociation from and condemnation of certain policies and practices.
Moreover, both are communicative, though their audiences may differ.
The official who departs from the rules of her office addresses her
action principally to the individuals or groups whom she intends to
assist through her breach of a specific duty. Her action demonstrates
to these parties both that she disagrees with a policy that would treat
them in a certain way and that her actions align with her commitments.
Where civil disobedience and rule departure differ is, first, in the
identity of their practitioners. Whereas rule departure typically is an
action taken by an agent of the state (including juries), civil
disobedience typically is an action taken by citizens (including
officials acting as ordinary citizens and not in the capacity of their
official role). Second these practices differ in their legality.
Whether rule departure actually involves a breach of law is unclear.
Civil disobedience, by contrast, involves the breach of a law currently
on the books. A third difference between rule departure and civil
disobedience is that, unlike civil disobedience, rule departure does
not usually expose those who employ it to the risks of sanction or
punishment (Feinberg 1979)

Conscientious Objection: This kind of protest may be
understood as a violation of the law motivated by the dissenter's
belief that she is morally prohibited to follow the law because the law
is either bad or wrong, totally or in part. The conscientious objector
may believe, for example, that the general character of the law in
question is morally wrong (as an absolute pacifist would believe of
conscription), or that the law extends to certain cases which it should
not cover (an orthodox Christian would regard euthanasia as murder)
(Raz 1979, 263). While commonly taken to refer to pacifist objections
to military service, conscientious objection, says Raz, may apply to
any law, negative or positive, that a person believes for moral reasons
she is compelled to disobey. A narrower conception of conscientious
objection, described as conscientious refusal, characterises this kind
of disobedience as non-compliance with a more or less direct legal
injunction or administrative order (Rawls 1971, 368). Examples would
be the refusal of Jehovah's Witnesses to salute the flag or
Thoreau's refusal to pay his taxes (it is interesting that the
action of the man who coined the term ‘civil disobedience’
is regarded by many as lying at the periphery of what counts as civil
disobedience). Whereas conscientious refusal is undertaken with the
assumption that authorities are aware of the breach of law,
conscientious evasion is undertaken with the assumption that the breach
of law is wholly covert. The devout person who continues to practice
her religion in secret after it has been banned does not protest
against the law, but breaches it covertly for moral reasons. The
personal nature of this disobedience commands respect, as it suggests
modesty and reflection, which more vocal and confident displays of
conviction may lack.

The differences between civil disobedience and conscientious evasion
are easier to identify than those between civil disobedience and
conscientious refusal or conscientious objection. Although
conscientious objection typically is not characterised by the aim to
communicate to government and society either that a law has been
breached or the reasons behind the breach, nevertheless many acts
commonly classified as conscientious objection – tax avoidance
and resistance to conscription – have a public or communicative
component. Moreover, when such actions are taken by many people their
collective impact can approximate the kind of communicative protest
exemplified in civil disobedience.

A more obvious difference between civil disobedience and
conscientious objection is that, whereas the former is invariably
illegal, sometimes the latter is legal. In the context of military
conscription, some legal systems regard conscientious objection as a
legitimate ground for avoiding frontline military service.

Radical Protest: Some forms of dissent such as coercive
violence, organised forcible resistance, militant action,
intimidation, and terrorisation lie further outside the realm of
tolerated (or tolerable) political action than civil disobedience
does. There are reasons to avoid labelling such disobedience (or
anything else) as ‘terrorism’. Not only is the term
‘terrorism’ inflammatory, but also it is bandied
about by governments to capture an overly broad range of
actions. Whereas ‘civil disobedience’ has developed as a
positive term which many people apply to their own protests,
‘terrorism’ is an epithet applied only to the actions of
others. Given the highly negative connotations of this term, its
(philosophical) usefulness is questionable. Less loaded notions of
intimidation, terrorisation, forcible resistance, and severe violence
offer greater space for a proper analysis of the justifiability of
using such measures in political protest.

While a civil disobedient does not necessarily oppose the regime in
which she acts, the militant or radical protester is deeply opposed to
that regime (or a core aspect of that regime). This protester uses
modes of communication unlikely to persuade others of the merits of her
position. Her aims are more urgent and extreme than those of the civil
disobedient; she seeks rapid change through brutal strategies of
coercion and intimidation, not through strategies of persuasion and
moral appeal. And often her action includes force or extreme violence
as a key component. Given the nature of her conduct and objectives, she
is likely to try to evade the legal consequences of her action. This is
less often the case for civil disobedients.

Revolutionary Action: The difference between radical
protest and revolutionary action may be as difficult to specify as that
between revolutionary action and civil disobedience. One point of
difference amongst the three concerns the nature of the objectives.
Acts of civil disobedience often have focused and limited objectives.
Acts of terrorisation or large-scale coercive violence are typically
associated with a general aim of generating fear and insecurity while
keeping any specific aims or demands oblique. Revolutionary action is
typified by a comprehensive objective to bring about a regime change.
Both acts of radical protest and acts of civil disobedience can of
course fall within a revolutionary project, and may even coincide with
each other (as they perhaps did in the sabotage strategies used by
Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress).

As a general practice, revolution, like radical protest, does not
seek to persuade the government to change established policies. But,
unlike much radical protest, revolutionary action may seek to persuade
the society under that government that a change in regime is required.
If revolutionaries seek to persuade the government of anything, it is
that it should cease to be the government. In India, Gandhi had some
success in this project. Once the movement became irresistible, the
British left India fairly peacefully. But Gandhi's revolutionary
project may be contrasted with other revolutions such as the French
revolution, or even the South African revolution, where there were
endorsements of revolutionary terror. Large-scale resistance that
incorporates terrorisation is quite a different enterprise from the
non-violent resistance that distinguished Gandhi's
protest. Since, as noted above, people may engage in dissent for
numerous reasons, acts of civil disobedience like Gandhi's that
are guided by conscientious commitments can also be driven by
revolutionary aims.

The various points of contact and overlap amongst different types of
political protest suggest that there is no one-dimensional continuum
from weak to strong dissent. There is more plausibility in the idea of
a multi-dimensional continuum of protest, which recognises the
complexities in such critical points of contrast as legality, violence,
harm, communication, motivation, and persuasiveness.

On many views, an analysis of the justifiability of civil
disobedience must consider not only the dissenter's particular
action and its likely consequences, but also her motivation for
engaging in this act of civil disobedience. Factors relevant to a
disobedient's choice of action include: its illegality, its use
as a last resort or first resort, any coordination with other
dissenters, the likelihood of success, the directness or indirectness
of the action, and the expected harm. Factors relevant to motivation
include: the merit or lack thereof in the dissenter's cause, her
reasons for defending that cause, and her reasons for engaging in this
form of protest. Although they are examined separately below, these two
sets of factors inevitably overlap.

The task of defending civil disobedience is commonly undertaken with
the assumption that in reasonably just, liberal societies people have a
general moral obligation to follow the law. In the history of
philosophy, many arguments have been given for legal obligation (often
called ‘political obligation’). Plato's Socrates, in
the Crito, offers at least two lines of argument for legal
obligation in order to defend his decision not to escape from prison.
First, Socrates emphasises the importance of moral consistency; he
would prefer to give up his life than to compromise his principles. A
basic principle for Socrates is that a person must never do wrong or
injury in return for wrong. To escape without persuading the state
would be to try to destroy it and its laws. Second, Socrates maintains
that he has an obligation to follow the laws of Athens since he has
tacitly agreed to do so and since he enjoys the rights and benefits of
citizenship. This voluntarist line of argument is also espoused later
by John Locke, who argues that we have a duty to follow the law only
when we have consented to its rule. This view contrasts with the
non-voluntarist position of David Hume, according to which the
obligation to follow the law is rooted in the value of government under
law. From these two traditions rise the principal contemporary
arguments for legal obligation, which concern respectively consent,
gratitude, promise-keeping, fairness, necessary institutions, and
public good. Many of the contemporary voluntarist and non-voluntarist
arguments have been criticised in recent debates, giving rise to the
view that, while there are both ordinary reasons to follow the law and
strong moral obligations to follow particular laws, there is no general
moral obligation to follow the law. One reason to think there is no
such obligation is that the legality of an action does not
significantly affect its moral status (Smith 1973). The claim is that
jaywalking across an empty street, for example, is hardly reprehensible
and its illegality does not make it more reprehensible. Similarly,
spitting at someone's feet or refusing without cause to
acknowledge that person is reprehensible and its legality does not
diminish that.

On the assumption that people have a pro tanto obligation
to follow the law (or at least those laws that are not excessively
unjust), it follows that people then have a pro tanto
obligation to use the proper legal channels of political participation
before resorting to illegal methods. On this view, civil disobedience
can be justified only when employed as a last resort. But since causes
defended by a minority are often those most opposed by persons in
power, legal channels may be less than wholly effective. Moreover, it
is unclear when a person could claim to have reached the situation of
last resort; she could continue to use the same tired legal methods
without end. To ward off such challenges, Rawls suggests that, if past
actions have shown the majority to be immovable or apathetic, then
further attempts may reasonably be thought fruitless and one may be
confident one's civil disobedience is a last resort.

Another condition for civil disobedience to be justified, according
to Rawls, is that disobedients coordinate with other minorities. Since
minority groups are equally justified in resorting to civil
disobedience when they have sufficiently weighty objections, these
groups should avoid undermining each others' efforts through
simultaneous appeals to the attention of society and government. Some
coordination of activities is required, says Rawls, to regulate the
overall level of dissent (Rawls 1971, 374–5). While there is some
merit to this condition, civil disobedience that does not meet it might
still be justifiable. In some cases, there will be no time or
opportunity to coordinate with other minorities. And in other cases,
other minority groups may be unable or unwilling to coordinate. It is
an open question then whether the refusal or inability of other groups
to cooperate should affect the ultimate defensibility of a
person's decision to engage in civil disobedience.

A reason for Rawls to defend this coordination requirement is that,
in most cases, it serves a more important concern, namely, the
achievement of good consequences. It is often argued that civil
disobedience can only be justified if there is a high probability of
producing positive change through that disobedience. Only this can
justify exposing one's society to the risk of harm. The harms usually
identified with civil disobedience are as follows. First, civil
disobedience can be a divisive force in society. Second, since civil
disobedience is normally designed to attract public attention, it can
lead people, as a result, to think of resorting to disobedience to
achieve whatever changes in law or policy they find justified (Raz
1979, 262). Third, civil disobedience can encourage more than just
other civil disobedience; it can encourage a general disrespect for the
law, particularly where the law is perceived as being lenient toward
certain kinds of offences.

In response to these challenges, one might question the empirical
claims that civil disobedience is divisive and that it has the
consequence of leading others to use disobedience to achieve changes in
policy. One might also question whether it necessarily would be a
bad thing if civil disobedience had these consequences. Concerning
likelihood of success, civil disobedience actually can seem most
justifiable when the situation appears hopeless and when the government
refuses to listen to conventional forms of communication. Additionally,
even when general success seems unlikely, civil disobedience might be
defended for any reprieve from harm that it brings to victims of a bad
law or policy. Tree-hugging, for example, can delay or curtail a
clear-cut logging scheme and thereby prolong the protection of an
eco-system.

Two final factors concerning a disobedient's choice of action
are non-violence and directness. Many theorists regard non-violence as
necessary to the justifiability of civil disobedience. But, as noted
earlier, there can be good reasons to prefer strategic use of violence
in civil disobedience to the harm and injustice of the law. Sometimes
the wrong that a dissenter perceives may be so iniquitous that it is
right to use violence to root it out. Such violence may be necessary to
preserve or to re-establish the rights and civil liberties that
coercive practices seek to suspend (Raz 1979). Concerning directness,
some argue that civil disobedience is more justifiable the more direct
it is since direct disobedience targets the specific legal wrong that
prompted it (Greenawalt 1987, 235). While directness may ensure that
the objective of the dissent is understood, it has disadvantages; and
in some contexts direct action cannot be justified. When direct
disobedience would fail to treat others with respect or would cause far
greater harm than either adherence to the law or indirect disobedience
would cause, then indirect disobedience has a greater claim to
justification. But, when indirect civil disobedience would be either
misconstrued or viewed in isolation from the law opposed, then direct
disobedience, assuming it meets certain moral requirements (which are
determined by the content of the law opposed), may have greater
justification. People who use indirect disobedience have, other things
being equal, no objective reasons to breach the law that they breach.
This means that the justification for their disobedience must turn
solely on the value of that action as the appropriate vehicle through
which to communicate their objection.

As a vehicle for communication, civil disobedience has much to be
said for it. It was noted in Section 1.3 that civil disobedience can
often better contribute to a dialogue with society and the state than
legal protest can since controllers of mainstream media tend not to
give unpopular views a hearing unless they are advocated through
sensational means such as illegal protest. But, as the above points
have indicated, the justifiability of an act of civil disobedience
depends greatly on its specific features. Civil disobedience
sometimes serves primarily to inform and to educate the public about an
issue. But other times, it acts by confronting the majority with the
higher costs of retaining a given law or policy in the face of
continued, concerted opposition. The nature of these strategies and, as
discussed below, the motivations for selecting one over another inform
an analysis of justifiability.

On many views, for an act of civil disobedience to be justified, it
is insufficient that the dissenter's act meet criteria such as
those noted above. It is equally important that she choose that action
for the right reasons. The first requirement she must satisfy is that
her cause be well-founded. A dissenter may believe that her cause is
just and that her disobedience is morally permissible, but she might be
mistaken either about the facts or about her principles. Assuming her
challenge is well-founded, there are two further issues. The first
pertains to her reasons for supporting this cause. The second pertains
to her reasons for taking this particular act of disobedience.

Concerning the former, if a person advocates a legitimate cause such
as equal rights for black Americans simply for the reason that she
seeks re-election or promotion or the admiration of friends while
having no real sympathy for this cause, then she acts not for decisive
reasons. To be fully justified in her defence of this cause, she must
act on the basis of good reasons to support equality amongst peoples;
such reasons could include her sense of injustice for the ill-treatment
of black Americans or her respect for the dignity of persons or her
appreciation that real equality of rights best serves the interests of
all American people. It would be appropriate to judge negatively the
character of a person who was improperly motivated to take praiseworthy
action in defence of others' rights.

Concerning the latter, sometimes reasons apply to a situation but do
not favour the particular action that a person takes. When deciding how
best to defend a legitimate cause, a person must give thought to the
appropriate strategy to adopt. A person may have reasons for engaging
in one form of disobedience, but choose to engage in another form that
is not supported by these reasons. For example, she may have an
undefeated reason to participate in a road block because this action is
well suited to her political concerns and is one that her government
understands and responds well to or because this action has a public
impact that does not greatly harm the interests of others; but, she has
no undefeated reason, say, to trespass on government property or to
engage in vandalism. In taking the latter actions, she is guilty of a
certain error of judgment about which actions are supported by reasons
that admittedly apply (See Gardner and Macklem 2002). Given her error,
the best she could claim is that her conduct is excused, as she had
reason to believe that she had reason to undertake that particular form
of civil disobedience. When, by contrast, a person's civilly
disobedient action is supported by undefeated reasons that apply to her
situation then her choice of action is justified. The justification for
her action stems from its appropriateness as the action to take. Its
appropriateness is structured in part by the political regime, the tone
of the social environment, the actions taken by other political
participants, and so on. All of these factors bear on the
appropriateness of a given action and the manner in which it is
performed, and thus determine to what extent the reasons that support
it provide a justification.

The various constraints and requirements discussed above do not
amount to a complete defence for civil disobedience. A fuller defence
would appeal to the social value of civil disobedience. Justified civil
disobedience, says Rawls, can serve to inhibit departures from justice
and to correct departures when they occur; thus it can act as a
stabilising force in society (Rawls 1971, 383). Justice aside, civil
disobedience and dissent more generally contribute to the democratic
exchange of ideas by forcing the champions of dominant opinion to
defend their views. Mill maintains in On Liberty that if there
are any persons who contest a received opinion, we should thank them
for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is
someone to do for us what we otherwise ought to do ourselves (Mill
1999, 90). In fact, one could argue that those who breach the law in
justified civil disobedience demonstrate responsible citizenship or
civic virtue. Richard Dagger argues that

To be virtuous…is to perform well a socially necessary or
important role. This does not mean that the virtuous person must always
go along with the prevailing views or attitudes. On the contrary,
Socrates and John Stuart Mill have persuaded many people to believe
that questioning and challenging the prevailing views are among the
highest forms of virtue (Dagger 1997, 14).

This view of dissent and justified civil disobedience aligns with an
increasingly common perception that our responsibilities as citizens
go well beyond any obligation to follow the law. Indeed, under certain
conditions, our obligations are to resist unjust and unfair schemes,
and this can include a duty to disobey the law (Delmas 2014).

An issue associated with, but distinct from, that of justification is
whether people have a right to engage in civil disobedience. Most
thinkers who have considered civil disobedience defend a limited right
to such protest. Rawls, for example, maintains that, even in a nearly
just society, a person may be supposed to have a right to engage in
civil disobedience when three conditions are met. These are the
conditions he sets for justified civil disobedience: it is undertaken
1) in response to an instance of substantial and clear injustice, 2)
as a last resort and 3) in coordination with other minority groups.
Rawls's approach has been criticised for not clearly
distinguishing his account of justified civil disobedience from an
account of the disobedience which people have a right to take. There
is much disagreement over the kinds of actions that can be captured by
rights. Some theorists, such as John Mackie, argue that there can be no
right to perform a morally wrong action since wrong actions are acts
we are morally required not to perform (Mackie 1978). Others, such as
Raz, argue that to restrict rights to morally right actions is to
misunderstand the nature of rights. Rights of conduct protect a
certain sphere of autonomy and liberty for the agent with which
interference by others is restricted, that is to say, rights of
conduct imply that interference with that conduct is unjustified even
when the conduct is itself unjustified. One does not require a right,
Raz observes, to do the right thing. But one often does require a
right to do what one should not do (cf. Waldron 1981). On this view,
the limits of the right to political participation, for example, are
set not by the nature of people's political objectives, but by
the form of the actions they employ to realise those objectives.

According to Raz, when one considers the idea of a moral right to
civil disobedience, one must appreciate that this right extends to
cases in which people should not exercise it. To say that there is a
right to civil disobedience is to allow the legitimacy of resorting to
this form of political action to one's political opponents. It is
to allow that the legitimacy of civil disobedience does not depend on
the rightness of one's cause (Raz 1979, 268).

In his account of a right to civil disobedience, Raz places great
emphasis on the kind of regime in which a disobedient acts. Raz
argues that only in an illiberal regime do certain individuals have a
right to civil disobedience.

Given that the illiberal state violates its members' right to
political participation, individuals whose rights are violated are
entitled, other things being equal, to disregard the offending laws
and exercise their moral right as if it were recognised by law…
[M]embers of the illiberal state do have a right to civil disobedience
which is roughly that part of their moral right to political
participation which is not recognised in law (Raz 1979,
272–273).

By contrast, in a liberal state, Raz argues, a person's right to
political activity is, by hypothesis, adequately protected by law.
Therefore, in such a regime, the right to political participation
cannot ground a right to civil disobedience.

Against Raz, one could argue, as David Lefkowitz does, that when a
person appeals to political participation rights to defend her
disobedience she does not necessarily criticise the law for outlawing
her action. Lefkowitz maintains that members of minorities can
appreciate that democratic discussions often must be cut short so that
decisions may be taken. As such, persons who engage in political
disobedience may view current policy as the best compromise between
the need to act and the need to accommodate continued
debate. Nonetheless, they also can observe that, with greater
resources or further time for debate, their view might have held
sway. Given this possibility, the right to political participation
must include a right to continue to contest the result after the votes
are counted or the decisions taken. And this right should include
suitably constrained civil disobedience because the best conception of
political participation rights is one that reduces as much as possible
the impact that luck has on the popularity of a view (Lefkowitz
2007; see also Ceva 2015).

An alternative response to Raz questions whether the right to civil
disobedience must be derived from rights to political
participation. Briefly, the right to civil disobedience could be
grounded on something other than participation rights such as a
right to object on the basis of conscience. Whether such a right to
conscience would fall under participation rights depends on the
expansiveness of the latter rights. When the right to participate is
understood to accommodate only legal protest, then the right
conscientiously to object, which commonsensically includes civil
disobedience, must be viewed as distinct from political participation
rights.

A further challenge to Raz might be that real societies do not align
with this dichotomy between liberal and illiberal regimes; rather they
fall along a spectrum of liberality and illiberality, being both more
or less liberal relative to each other and being more or less liberal
in some domains than in others. Given the stringency of Raz's
notion of a liberal regime, it is unlikely that any society could be
wholly liberal. So, although Raz may have grounds to hold that in the
truly liberal society a right to civil disobedience would not exist and
that, to the extent that our society approximates such a regime, the
case for such a right diminishes, nevertheless in the majority of real
societies, if not all real societies, a right to civil disobedience
does exist. Note that to make legally protected participation fully
adequate, the liberal society would have to address Russell's
charge that controllers of the media give defenders of unpopular views
few opportunities to make their case unless they resort to sensational
methods such as disobedience.

Ronald Dworkin rests the right to civil disobedience not just on a
person's right to political participation, but on all of the
rights that she has against her government. People may be supposed to
have a fundamental right against the government, such as freedom of
expression, when that right is important to their dignity, to their
standing as persons equally entitled to concern and respect, or to some
other personal value of consequence. A person has a right to disobey a
law, says Dworkin, whenever that law wrongly invades her rights against
the government (Dworkin 1977, 192). Thus, the moral right to breach
the law is not a separate right, like a right of conscience, additional
to other rights against the government. It is that part of
people's rights against the government which the government fails
to honour.

Together the three above positions bring out some key points of
disagreement amongst philosophers on the issue of a right to civil
disobedience. First, philosophers disagree over the grounds of this
right. Is it derivative of a right to participate in the political
decision-making process? Is it derivative of other rights? Is it
founded on a person's equal status as a being worthy of concern
and respect? Second, philosophers disagree over the parameters of the
right. Does it extend to all acts of civil disobedience or only to
those acts that meet certain conditions of justifiability? Third,
philosophers differ over the kinds of regimes in which the right
arises. Does it exist only in illiberal regimes or does it hold in all
regimes including just regimes? A final issue, not brought out in any
of the above views, is whether the right to civil disobedience extends
to indirect civil disobedience. Presumably, it should, but none of the
above positions offer arguments on which one could base such a
claim.

The final issue to consider is how authorities should respond to
civil disobedience. The question of appropriate legal response applies,
first, to the actions of law-enforcers when deciding whether and how to
intervene in a civilly disobedient action, whether to arrest, whether
to charge, and so on. It applies, second, to the actions of prosecutors
when deciding whether to proceed to trial. Finally, it applies to the
actions of judges (and juries) when deciding whether to convict and
(for judges) how much to punish. The focus here will be the issue of
appropriate punishment.

To determine when, if ever, punishment of civil disobedience is
appropriate, it is necessary first to say a few things about the
nature, purposes, and justification of lawful punishment by the state.
The three basic issues of punishment are: Why punish?, Whom to punish?,
and How much to punish? The justifications for punishment can be
forward-looking, backward-looking or some combination of the two.
Jeremy Bentham, for one, takes a forward-looking, consequentialist view
of punishment. He holds that punishment is an evil that is only ever
justified if its employment prevents some greater evil that would arise
from not punishing (Bentham, 1789, 158).

A key variant of the consequentialist approach focuses on
deterrence. Punishment is justified on deterrence grounds if it
prevents and/or discourages both the offender and others from breaching
the law. Deterrence theories are criticised for treating people as
brutes not rational agents capable of responding to moral reasons
because the deterrent element of punishment gives people a prudential
reason (relating to the prospect of punishment), not a moral reason, to
refrain from breaching the law. Deterrence theories also are criticised
for allowing persons who are not proper objects of punishment to be
punished when this succeeds in deterring other people from breaching
the law. Finally, deterrence theories are criticised for making the
parameters for appropriate punishment excessively broad in allowing
that whatever punishment is needed to deter people is the justified
punishment.

Desert theory, by contrast, takes a backward-looking view of the
purpose and justification of punishment, focusing on what the offender
deserves for her action. Desert theory is much more concerned than is
deterrence theory with punishing only persons who are the proper
objects of punishment and with punishing those persons only as much as
they deserve. Desert theory aims at a response to the offence that is
proportionate to its seriousness as an offence. Seriousness is
determined by two factors: an offender's culpability and the harm
caused by her action. Desert theories are criticised for insufficiently
defending the view that the guilty always should be punished. Although
the intuition that the guilty deserve to suffer is widely shared, it is
not obvious why they deserve this. Desert theories are also criticised
for assuming both that fact-finders can determine what offenders
deserve and that the deserved punishment is necessarily the justified
punishment: should people always be punished as they deserve?

A variant of desert theory is the communicative theory of
punishment, which takes both a forward-looking and a backward-looking
view of the purposes of punishment. The purposes of punishment on a
communicative account are both to convey the state's condemnation
of the action and to lead the offender to repent her action and to
reform her conduct. On a communicative conception of punishment, the
state aims to engage with the offender in a moral dialogue so that she
appreciates the moral reasons she has to follow the law. According to
some communicative theories, condemnation itself sufficiently justifies
punishment. Punishment may be seen as a secular form of penance that
vividly confronts the offender with the effects of her crime (Duff
1998, 162). According to other, less monistic communicative theories,
communication of censure alone is insufficient to justify punishment;
added to it must be the aim of deterrence (von Hirsch 1998, 171).
Still other communicative theories add different considerations to the
grounds for justification. On one pluralistic view, a distinction is
drawn between the punishment that is deserved according to justice and
the punishment that is actually justified. When, for example, an
offender demonstrates repentance for her offence prior to punishment,
the law has reason to be merciful toward her and to impose a less
severe punishment than that which she deserves (Tasioulas 2006). Mercy
involves a charitable concern for the well-being of the offender as a
potential recipient of deserved punishment. Given this offender's
repentance, the justified punishment in this case is less than it would
be were there no grounds for mercy.

Deterrence systems of punishment recommend a simple approach to
civil disobedience. Since the purpose and justification of punishment
is to deter people from breaching the law, a deterrence system would
impose on civil disobedients whatever punishment was necessary and
sufficient to achieve that end. Whether that punishment would be less
or more severe than, or equal to, that imposed on ordinary offenders
depends on empirical considerations. Sometimes greater punishment than
that required for ordinary offenders would be in order since
disobedients who are serious in their moral conviction may not be
deterred by standard punishments. Other times, however, less punishment
than that for ordinary offenders would be in order since disobedients
usually are not ‘hardened’ criminals and thus may need less
severe treatment to deter them from offending.

In contrast to deterrence systems, monistic desert systems and
communicative systems of punishment would only punish civil
disobedients if, and to the extent that, they deserve to be punished. A
pluralistic communicative system, which gives weight to considerations
of mercy as well as retribution or desert, would only punish to the
extent that the punishment was justified (not to the extent that it was
deserved) since mercy toward the offender might recommend punishing her
less than she deserves according to justice. The pluralistic approach
raises the question whether being motivated by civil disobedience might
give the law a reason to show mercy towards an offender. One might
argue that a disobedient's conviction and commitments, which make
it very difficult for her both to adhere to norms that violate those
commitments and to desist from using effective means of protest, are
facts about her circumstances that give the law reason to show mercy
toward her. This would lessen the severity of any justified response
from the law.

For desert and communicative theories concerned solely with
justice-based desert, the key question is whether disobedients deserve
censure, and if so, how much? There are at least three possible
replies. One is that disobedients deserve the same punishment as the
ordinary offenders who breach the same laws. There are several reasons
to take this view. First, as Greenawalt puts it, the demands of
proportionality would seem to recommend a uniform application of legal
prohibitions. Since trespass is prohibited, persons who breach trespass
laws in protest of either those laws or other laws are equally liable
to persons who breach trespass laws for private purposes. Second, also
from Greenawalt comes the suggestion that any principle that officials
may excuse justified illegal acts will result in some failures to
punish unjustified acts, for which the purposes of punishment would be
more fully served. Even when officials make correct judgments about
which acts to excuse, citizens may draw mistaken inferences, and
restraints of deterrence and norm acceptance may be weakened for
unjustified acts that resemble justified ones (Greenawalt 1987, 273).
Therefore all such violations, justified and unjustified, should be
treated the same.

But much of this turns on the assumption that civilly disobedient
breaches of law are in fact comparable to ordinary offences and deserve
a comparable response from the law. The discussion in Section 1 of the
key features of civil disobedience showed that it differs greatly from
ordinary offences both in motivation and in mode of action, let alone
moral justification. This would suggest that civil disobedience should
be regarded in the eyes of the law as a different kind of disobedience
from common crimes. This leaves two options: civil disobedience
deserves greater censure or it deserves less censure than ordinary
crimes do.

There are reasons to believe that civil disobedients should be dealt
with more severely than ordinary offenders are. First, there is the
fact that disobedients seem to have put themselves above the law in
preferring their own moral judgment about a certain issue to that of
the democratic decision-making process and the rule of law. (Although
some judges have endorsed this caricature, it is worth noting that it
clashes with how both dissenters and many theorists characterise their
activities; cf. Rawls 1971; Greenawalt 1987; Markovits 2006.)
Second, the communicative aspect of civil disobedience could be said to
aggravate such offences since it usually is attended by much greater
publicity than most covert violations are. This forces legal
authorities to concern themselves with the possibility that law-abiding
citizens will feel distressed, insecure and perhaps imposed on if no
action is taken. So, notes Greenawalt, while authorities may quietly
let minor breaches pass, failure to respond to violations performed, in
some respect, in the presence of authority, may undercut claims that
the rules and the persons who administered them deserve respect
(Greenawalt 1987, 351–2). Third, any use of violence would seem to
aggravate civil disobedience particularly when it increases the harm of
the offence or when it directly incites further and unjustified
instances of violence. And although violence may eloquently communicate
a dissenter's seriousness and frustration, it changes the nature
of the dialogue. It pushes authorities to respond in ways consonant
with their stance on violence – responses which may be harsher
than those they would otherwise wish to make toward acts of civil
disobedience that defend values they can appreciate.

The final possible view is that civil disobedients should be dealt
with more leniently than ordinary offenders are, at least when their
disobedience is morally justified. These offenders are conscientiously
motivated and often their protests serve the interests of society by
forcing a desirable re-examination of moral boundaries. That said,
moral justifications do not usually translate into legal justifications
and disobedients have been notoriously unsuccessful at advancing a
defence of necessity (a defence that their action was legally justified
being the lesser of two evils). Whether the law should be more
accommodating of their conscientious motivation and efforts to engage
in moral dialogue with government and society is a topic for further
debate.

Some theorists maintain that civil disobedience is an outdated,
overanalysed notion that little reflects current forms of political
activism, which tend toward more extreme modes of engagement. Herbert
Storing has suggested that ‘The most striking characteristic of
civil disobedience is its irrelevance to the problems of today.’
(Storing 1991, 85). He said, shortly after the assassination of
Martin Luther King Jr, that the fashion of civil disobedience is as
likely to die out as it was to burst forth under the words of King.
There is of course much evidence to show that Storing was mistaken in
his predictions for the popularity of civil disobedience as a mode of
dissent. Certainly though there have been shifts in the paradigm forms
of civil disobedience in recent years; yet these shifts have occurred
largely within the framework of conscientious communication discussed
at the outset. The historical paradigms of Gandhi, King, the
suffragettes, and Mandela are representative of that kind of civil
disobedience which aims to guarantee legal protection for the basic
rights of a specific constituency. Such disobedience contrasts with
much contemporary civil disobedience, which focuses not on
individuals' basic rights, but on broader issues or special
interests such as the environment, animal rights, nuclear disarmament,
globalisation, foreign policy, and so on.

Civil disobedience taken in support of concerns such as the
environment or animal rights may be seen in part as a response to some
breakdown in the mechanisms for citizen engagement in the
decision-making process. This breakdown might be termed a democratic
deficit (Markovits 2005). Such deficits in that dialogue may be an
inevitable part of real democracies, and disobedience undertaken to
correct those deficits may be said to reflect, to varying degrees,
dissenters' sensitivity to democratic ideals. Civil disobedience
remains today very much a vibrant part of liberal democracies and there
are significant issues concerning civil disobedience for philosophers
to address, particularly in how this practice may be distinguished from
more radical forms of protest and how this practice should be treated
by the law.